Somebody's broken heart
by WaltzMatildah
Summary: becomes your favourite song... For all that they argue to be left alone, they sure will self destruct together. A look at Alex and Lexie and their dysfunctionally destructive non-relationship.


**Prompt:** _No one's giving up quite yet, we've got too much to lose_, from the song "Sweet and Low" by Augustana.

**Note:** This response is more like the anti-prompt! But it was inspired by the prompt nonetheless and that's all that really counts, yes?! Title is from "Funny The Way It Is", by the Dave Matthews Band. Lyrics in text are from "Warehouse", also by the Dave Matthews Band.

**Disclaimer:** All television shows, movies, books, and other copyrighted material referred to in this work, and the characters, settings, and events thereof, are the properties of their respective owners. As this work is an interpretation of the original material and not for-profit, it constitutes fair use. Reference to real persons, places, or events are made in a fictional context, and are not intended to be libellous, defamatory, or in any way factual.

**Somebody's broken heart becomes your favourite song...**

by Waltzmatildah.

---

She doesn't know why she's let this go on for as long as she has (as though the notion that she's in anything even remotely resembling control is somehow close to the truth). She waits, naked and pathetic and wrapped in sheets that still smell like her anyway. She never knows what to expect when he gets there. If he gets there. What will come of it. What will come of them.

Except she does know. Nothing. Nothing will come of them

She just one girl in a long line of girls that begins and ends with someone else.

_(Izzie.)_

She doesn't even feel guilty anymore.

She knows she should. She should feel guilty. Hell, she doesn't even really _like _the guy, not if she's completely honest with herself. He's too unavailable, too absent, too displaced. Too everything that she doesn't need in spades.

Too not Mark.

And maybe _that's_ why she keeps coming back.

Because when she's full of the only bits of him that he'll ever share (his fingers, his tongue, his cock, buried so deep and dark and hard that she can almost _taste _his soul) she wonders how she could ever want anything else. Could ever _need _anything else.

At least this way she might just leave a legacy.

Who cares if it's for any of the right reasons.

They're still reasons nonetheless.

He does lines of coke from the hollow above her collar bone and drinks tequila from between her thighs. Her knees are carpet burned, shiny red raw, and his eyes never quite make it all the way to open. He got married in a church and they both know it.

They're going to hell anyway and they've got nothing left to lose.

- - -

She no longer bothers to knock. There's never anybody else.

(And maybe that should be warning enough.)

She's already naked and so is he, all pretense of modesty and pride having been long since abandoned. Skewed curtains filter ambient light that dances on the dust motes separating them. She lifts a discarded bottle of beer to her lips and drains the liquid courage like it's the lifeline she's so desperately searching for.

That she finds it in a bottle is oddly comforting and shockingly disturbing all in the same jagged exhale. His smirk in the half light ices her blood so she runs her tongue roughly over teeth, purses her chapped lips and erases it viciously. She will not be judged by him. After all, he is evolving into exactly what he swore never to become.

Genetic predisposition to fail when it matters most. She will not be judged by him.

For all that they argue to be left alone, they sure will self destruct together. Two for the price of one.

Poetic. Pathetic. Whatever.

(And she's even starting to _think _like him.)

- - -

They have an air of the untouchable about them. Or maybe it's simply that no one bothers to care anymore, to look sideways at them, to notice the trail of crumbs they leave behind when they move from one room to the next, through hallways, down staircases.

Some heart here. A little piece of soul there.

(At least they've managed to retain what remains of their livers.

A bitter laugh. They could come in handy later.)

- - -

The first time he grunts that they should get their own place she pretends not to hear him and he pretends not to care.

- - -

He sheds skin cells under her fingernails, leaves traces of salty sweat on her palms. Scrubbing in for surgeries feels a lot more like cleansing than it ever used to.

She keeps her hair blonde and slowly begins to feel like a parody of the naïve little girl she once was. There is a rolled dollar bill in the corner of her dresser draw, hidden amongst underwear and discarded memories. She'd contemplated using a hundred but the cliché was too blinding, even for her.

She taps the bitter end against the tip of her tongue and watches him watch her through lowered lashes. He shrugs when she pouts.

They'd made a pact and he wasn't about to break it.

And since when did morals mean a damn thing to him anyway?

He stares hard at the carpet, so hard she thinks there might be indecipherable whisperings hidden there. She follows his gaze, sees nothing but looped pile and lint.

Darkness falls eventually. A black veil to hide the torment and the grief.

- - -

She comes home on a Friday and her stuff is gone; like maybe she had never been there in the first place. She'd almost believe that to be the truth, except she knows only too well that it's not. There's a note, folded by four, propped in the centre of a naked mattress, an address scrawled thickly across it, the ink a dark red stain.

She thinks maybe it's her blood because it sure feels like she's missing some.

She sleeps in an on-call room. Her attempt to assert an authority that she absolutely does not feel is weak at best and when he shoves open the door, wide eyed and wild, she struggles desperately to ignore the thrumming drumbeat of his pulse beneath her fingertips. Rampant and rare.

Because this was not the plan. This was not _her _plan.

(But who is she kidding? Any _plan _she may have had dissolved into ash months ago.

Long lost daughters and absent wives and John Doe's that never really were.)

- - -

She sleeps with his fingers twisted awkwardly between hers. The physical contact is foreign. New. Rules are being broken. The thought makes her pulse pound somewhere in the back of her left eye.

- - -

She explores their new residence like it's comprised of uncharted waters and prehistoric mountain ranges. One hand in front of her face, the other outstretched, palm flat against the smooth wall. She finds an acoustic guitar in the back of the hall closet. The latch on the case is tarnished and doesn't quite fit properly. A hinge on the back has become warped and stiff.

The metaphors are blinding. They make her grin.

She strums her fingers across the taut strings, fills the otherwise empty hall with a soft _hummm _that reverberates through to her knee caps, her back teeth, her rib cage. It's been tuned recently, the wood is carefully polished. More questions that she'll never get answers too.

She tilts her head against the closet door and waits. Waits for a reaction. She can wait all night for this.

He doesn't disappoint. Thunder clouds descend.

She plucks out chords just to prove to him that she can.

A, D, G, Dsus.

_(Shut up I'm thinking, I had a clue now it's gone forever..._  
_Sitting over these bones, you can read in whatever you're needing to...)_

He turns his back and she chalks up another hollow victory.

- - -

Someone gets pregnant. Someone else moves seven states across the country.

They commiserate their stagnancy together in the only way they know how.

- - -

He's the first to complete a full circle but she's the only one to see it coming. Her hand shakes and the ice in her glass is mocking. She knows his every curve and ache with a precision that terrifies them both.

(She doesn't know his mother's name. Or if it's still the memory of another time that he conjures when he's fucking her.

She never can tell these days.)

She's terrified of being alone, despite the fact that she's spent the last God knows how long convincing herself that that is exactly what she has always been. He no longer looks straight through her, ghostlike and ethereal, and she can't help but wonder whether relationships born of desperation and an absence of any mind-numbing alternatives could possibly be more solid and withstanding than the ones they've tried and failed at before.

She can't help but wonder whether she's brave enough to find out.

She breathes his name as though it's a question. _Alex?_ He turns to look at her, tentative but trying. Something deep inside her soul skips a beat, trips over it's own feet, flails and soars.

They rarely speak with consonants and vowels. They rarely need to.

And she finally thinks they might just make it out of this...


End file.
